Posted on 07/01/2008 10:08:46 AM PDT by forkinsocket
If Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush's, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe.
English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, "mice eat cheese". Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or "mice cheese eat".
"There's something pretty fundamental about these orders," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, who led the study.
Scientific charades To determine whether these differences carry over to unspoken communication, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked 40 native speakers of Chinese, Turkish, English and Spanish to mime scenarios shown on a computer screen using only their hands and body.
These included a boy drinking a bottle of soda and a ship's captain swinging a pail of water.
Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction.
"We actually thought we were going to get gestures that just matched your speech," Goldin-Meadow says.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
New Scientist? Can’t be. I saw no references to global warming in the article about speech and hand patterns. That mag has become almost as clownish as Gore. I cancelled my subscription a while ago... since there seems to be no longer any relationship between the magazine and real science.
Isn't that funny. Wouldn't the real question then be: Why do some languages force people to speak in a way that goes against how their brains work?
True syntactical differences exist between languages. Word order is hardly a true difference. Native speakers of Finnish make top rate database programmers, which right away should key somebody to the possibility that something is going on.
Eat cheese mice do.
We speak one of them. Would make an interesting study to determine the origins of subject-verb-object language ideas.
Which order do you think is the more natural one, the way your brain thinks?
I'm so prejudiced towards English I can't think straight, LOL.
Perhaps there are other benefits to the English way that we don't know about. From mere observation, I've always thought English was a good compromise language for the best communication. I have no idea.
Which do you think is best?
So, is reading Finnish similar to reading a computer program - all step-by-step and logical?
I think that how you learn to speak when very young affects how you think later, when you need to articulate complex and nuanced meaning.
Are you a database programmer?
No, but when I worked in a bank mortgage loan dept. I used a report writer we called Dylacore. That was before the bank used PCs. I could run jobs using the database on the mainframe. It was great fun. I was also the user coordinator between my dept. and the bank programmers.
Were there a number of Finnish programmers around? LOL
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.